With a dazzling new cover and smart new introduction, one of my favorite novels, "Appointment in Samarra" by John O'Hara, is reborn. Before some of you head back to school and read assignments of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, read O'Hara, who worked in their shadow. Who knows why some wonderful novels fail to endure in the public imagination? Perhaps it was that by the standards of 1934 readers found the sexual frankness of "Appointment in Samarra"...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran will not hesitate to defend Shi'ite Muslim holy sites in neighbouring Iraq against "killers and terrorists", Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday, following rapid advances by Sunni militants there over the past week. Speaking on live television, Rouhani said many people had signed up to go to Iraq to defend the sites and "put the terrorists in their place". He added that veteran fighters from Iraq's Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish communities...

As many as 3,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers mounted a military assault Thursday night on this insurgent-held city in what appeared to be the first major operation to retake areas from guerrillas before the January elections. Three battalions of U.S. troops from the 1st Infantry Division, or about 2,500 soldiers, backed by two battalions of Iraqi soldiers, began moving toward the city Thursday evening under cover of heavy fire. As midnight passed, exploding shells could be heard nearly 2...

TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Gunmen in military uniform broke into the city council and court house in Samarra in northern Iraq on Tuesday, holding the facility for four hours until police and army stormed the compound, the mayor and police officials said. Four policemen were killed in the fighting, along with three civilians who were visiting the city council and were shot when Iraqi security forces opened fire to retake the site, a senior police officer said. A further 47...

As U.S. forces intensify attacks on the city of Fallujah, military planners are drawing on lessons learned from the swift and overpowering assault this month on another bastion of the Sunni insurgency: the north-central city of Samarra. Until this month, Samarra was a kind of Fallujah Lite. Guerrillas held sway. U.S. troops steered clear. Reconstruction efforts ground to a halt. Then U.S. and Iraqi forces stormed in, waging one of the largest offensives since the fall of Saddam...

With a dazzling new cover and smart new introduction, one of my favorite novels, "Appointment in Samarra" by John O'Hara, is reborn. Before some of you head back to school and read assignments of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, read O'Hara, who worked in their shadow. Who knows why some wonderful novels fail to endure in the public imagination? Perhaps it was that by the standards of 1934 readers found the sexual frankness of "Appointment in Samarra"...

A military commander said U.S. and Iraqi forces were mopping up guerrilla fighters in Samarra on Saturday, a day after storming the insurgent stronghold in one of the largest offensives since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Sporadic gunfire echoed through the city, The Associated Press reported, and American snipers perched on downtown rooftops fired at anyone suspected of links to the insurgency. Heavy tank shelling and exchanges of machine-gun fire erupted in the northern...

(Reuters) - A newly-extended oil pipeline that passes through the ancient city of Babylon, once home of the Hanging Gardens, has sparked a row between archaeology officials and the oil ministry, part of a larger debate over how to preserve Iraq's heritage. Before being reopened to visitors in 2008, Babylon was used by U.S. and coalition forces as a base and suffered the ravages of war - troops parked tanks and weaponry at the site. Here is a look at some other...

The enemy body count is back. Sort of. U.S. military officials, in their regular news briefings in Iraq, have begun reporting on enemy killed in action, or KIA, after months of declining to detail the other side's losses. The Army had long resisted inclusion of such figures, in part fearing comparison to the Vietnam War-era, when enemy casualties always seemed to dwarf U.S. losses even as the war was going badly. But the drumbeat of U.S. casualties in Iraq--November was the...

Five American soldiers were killed when insurgents blew up a huge bomb beneath their convoy and then attacked the soldiers with a hail of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades, military officials said Friday. The attack Thursday in Dora, a dangerous neighborhood in southern Baghdad, added to the toll of the deadliest quarter yet for the American military in Iraq: 329 troops have been killed over the past three months, including 99 so far during June, according to an Associated Press count.

As residents of Samarra ventured outside for the first time in three days on Sunday, U.S. forces launched predawn air strikes on Fallujah, another so-called Sunni Triangle city that has become a "no-go" zone for U.S. and Iraqi troops. The U.S. military said it killed several militants there and destroyed a large cache of ammunition. It remains unknown whether Iraqi security forces can maintain control over Samarra after U.S. forces withdraw, beginning this week. National...

A truck bomb struck a Shiite mosque Tuesday in central Baghdad, killing 78 people and wounding more than 200, even as about 10,000 U.S. soldiers northeast of the capital used heavily armored Stryker and Bradley fighting vehicles to battle their way into an Al Qaeda sanctuary. The troops, under cover of attack helicopters, killed at least 22 insurgents in the offensive, the U.S. military said. The thunderous explosion at the Khulani mosque in the capital's busy commercial area of Sinak...

In a bold blow to Iraqi hopes for peace, suspected Al Qaeda bombers toppled the towering minarets of Samarra's revered Shiite shrine Wednesday, adding new provocation to old wounds a year after the mosque's Golden Dome was destroyed. The attack stoked fears of a surge in violence between Muslim sects. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government rushed to contain Shiite wrath against Sunnis: It clamped a curfew on Baghdad and asked for U.S. troop reinforcements in Samarra, 60...

U.S.-led forces battled with Shiite Muslim militiamen in southern Iraq on Monday and killed at least 20 suspected fighters, the military said, while car bombs and other violence left at least 40 people dead in the capital following days of calm brought on by a curfew. Violence also erupted again in Samarra, north of Baghdad, the site of a bombing Wednesday that targeted a revered Shiite shrine and prompted officials to clamp curfews on Baghdad and Samarra. Police said...

Militants unleashed a series of car bomb attacks and ambushes in the city of Samarra and across central Iraq on Saturday, killing about 30 people, wounding nearly two dozen Americans and undercutting U.S. claims that rebel violence in the region had been brought under control. In Samarra, nearly simultaneous attacks targeted police stations and a U.S.-Iraqi military convoy, suggesting they may have been part of a coordinated assault. Most of the dead and wounded were Iraqi police...

By John Ward Anderson and K.I. Ibrahim, The Washington Post | June 17, 2007

Another Sunni mosque in the Basra area of southern Iraq was destroyed Saturday, as leading Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr called on his followers to march to the Sunni town of Samarra next month to a revered Shiite shrine that was attacked Wednesday. The call for a pilgrimage to al-Askari shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, could draw tens of thousands of Shiites into an area north of Baghdad that is a stronghold of the Sunni extremist group Al Qaeda in Iraq. In an unrelated development, the U.S....

By John Ward Anderson and K.I. Ibrahim, The Washington Post | June 17, 2007

Another Sunni mosque in the Basra area of southern Iraq was destroyed Saturday, as leading Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr called on his followers to march to the Sunni town of Samarra next month to a revered Shiite shrine that was attacked Wednesday. The call for a pilgrimage to al-Askari shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, could draw tens of thousands of Shiites into an area north of Baghdad that is a stronghold of the Sunni extremist group Al Qaeda in Iraq. In an unrelated development, the U.S....

A powerful explosion reduced a large Sunni Arab mosque to rubble near the southern city of Basra on Friday morning, in apparent retaliation for the bombing Wednesday of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. Although there had been scattered reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques in the hours after the Samarra shrine's minarets were demolished Wednesday, calls for restraint by political and religious figures, as well as strict security measures, appeared to halt broader violence. However, there...